Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday February 10, 2014 @02:10PM
from the find-it-now dept.

coondoggie writes "The scientists at DARPA say the current methods of searching the Internet for all manner of information just won't cut it in the future. Today the agency announced a program that would aim to totally revamp Internet search and 'revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of search results.' Specifically, the goal of DARPA's Memex program is to develop software that will enable domain-specific indexing of public web content and domain-specific search capabilities. According to the agency the technologies developed in the program will also provide the mechanisms for content discovery, information extraction, information retrieval, user collaboration, and other areas needed to address distributed aggregation, analysis, and presentation of web content."

Gee, I can't wait to participate in an echo chamber made up exclusively of nerds that got pissed to high hell when a UI redesign was _proposed_ on a site thats totally fucking free to them and will still work the same way in the future with regards to content (gripes about content aside)... What a joy it will be:[dream twinkles]

"The scientists at DARPA say the current methods of searching the Internet for all manner of information just won't cut it in the future" What the fuck are they thinking? If they can't just use GREP to find what they need they must be some serious federal fuckups! Get Ron Paul down here to stop this!!!!!!!!!11

I realized that the "Beta sucks!" chorus was bothering me, not just because it was a huge overreaction to, as you pointed out, a _proposed_ change to a _free_ site.

The thing that bothers me the most is that there seems to be almost a competition to show who can be the most obnoxious in registering their objections... from people who went through "gamer shaming" in high school, insults about nerdiness through college, and what not. It seems that these are people who

You're a fucking idiot. Slashdot isn't about the articles and it isn't about the fucking pathetic summaries. Slashdot is about the user-generated content. Slashdot is the comments.

Now, you think all that time spent by knowledgable members posting all that good stuff comes free? People invested their time, care and attention here. Slashdot isn't a fucking TV. Slashdot is a community.

The reason the response was negative and loud is because the beta makes it harder to follow threads. It makes it harder to follow discussion context. It makes it harder to comment within the discussion context.The beta redesign ruins the community experience. Dice is trying to turn Slashdot into another Digg or Reddit. Soon, you'll be flooded with ads you can't turn off, looking for the useful, informative and interesting comments that used to be posted here. Fuck that shit.

You're a fucking idiot. Slashdot isn't about the articles and it isn't about the fucking pathetic summaries. Slashdot is about the user-generated content. Slashdot is the comments.

Now, you think all that time spent by knowledgable members posting all that good stuff comes free? People invested their time, care and attention here. Slashdot isn't a fucking TV. Slashdot is a community.

The reason the response was negative and loud is because the beta makes it harder to follow threads. It makes it harder to follow discussion context. It makes it harder to comment within the discussion context.The beta redesign ruins the community experience. Dice is trying to turn Slashdot into another Digg or Reddit. Soon, you'll be flooded with ads you can't turn off, looking for the useful, informative and interesting comments that used to be posted here. Fuck that shit.

TL;DR: FUCK BETA!

Now, at least some reasoned, if seemingly over-wrought, debate.

You argue that the content, being user-provided, will go away if people are unable to see the content organized in a sensible fashion. Okay, I can buy that. I also hadn't considered that since the content is provided by users, they might have a reason to be a bit more passionate about how their thoughts are presented.

What I don't get is the need for insult to anybody who disagrees, or the call to leave Slashdot in droves even after they acknowle

Bitter vituperation towards the failed beta, even after it's gone, may do as much to drive away readership as the beta

2 things:

A
First, on the bitter vituperation, as one who quite unabashedly shared my thoughts about how and why the new design was/is bad: much of the speech was strongly voiced, but it was simply the truth. If Dice kills the site layout and function, I will stop coming here. That's not a threat so much as a fact that I feel dice should be privy to. I don't want them to kill the site, a

In this instance, by failing to read the wind, Dice bared this truth to all of us; reminded us that this community isn't really ours so much as it is theirs. Absolutely that was a hurt to the community.

Now that's something that I can take to the bank.

You see, I lost that aspect of it when I was seeing people posting line after line of "Fuck Beta", often anonymously, and often seeming to offer insults to anybody who felt differently.

You, on the other hand, have answered my questions without questioning my intelligence, or heaping scorn and abuse on my head for daring to have a different opinion, or generally resorting to name-calling, so I don't think you qualify for "bitter vituperation". <grin> Rat

It's only a "free" site if you consider that the time and effort that the participants put into it is valueless. And "Beta" is not a term generally used to mean "trial balloon". It usually means, Next Week In Production (unless you're Google, in which case "Next Week" can be removed).

The advertisers pay for the hosting services and infrastructure, but without content, the product is nothing. So users have a definite interest in keeping the site usable and comfortable.

It's only a "free" site if you consider that the time and effort that the participants put into it is valueless. And "Beta" is not a term generally used to mean "trial balloon". It usually means, Next Week In Production (unless you're Google, in which case "Next Week" can be removed).

The advertisers pay for the hosting services and infrastructure, but without content, the product is nothing. So users have a definite interest in keeping the site usable and comfortable.

I haven't actually seen the Beta yet, but if it's truly keeping with recent trends in other products towards removal of commonly-used features and insertion of empty glitz, as some anti-Beta whingers have asserted, I can see why there is cause for a major uproar.

We have a lot of self-professed Libertarians here, they chant the mantra claiming that if you don't like service pick a competitor. Consider Digg. That's basically the route that Digg went down, its users fled and Digg dug its own grave. There aren't so many competitors for Slashdot that its users want it too to be ruined, so they're trying to ensure that it doesn't go that route.

I don't often counsel this in the IT world, but if it ain't broke...

If it ain't broke, it must run at least as well as Friendster.... Right? Or maybe it runs as well as Altavista? Geocities? Need some more examples of services that failed to change at the right time? No one said "f--- this beta friendster s---, I'm going to facebook because I dont like this any more", did they? Nope, they said "well hell, 10 of my friends just joined facebook, what am I doing on friendster?" and the rest is history.

It's only a "free" site if you consider that the time and effort that the participants put into it is valueless. And "Beta" is not a term generally used to mean "trial balloon". It usually means, Next Week In Production (unless you're Google, in which case "Next Week" can be removed).

The advertisers pay for the hosting services and infrastructure, but without content, the product is nothing. So users have a definite interest in keeping the site usable and comfortable.

I haven't actually seen the Beta yet, but if it's truly keeping with recent trends in other products towards removal of commonly-used features and insertion of empty glitz, as some anti-Beta whingers have asserted, I can see why there is cause for a major uproar.

We have a lot of self-professed Libertarians here, they chant the mantra claiming that if you don't like service pick a competitor. Consider Digg. That's basically the route that Digg went down, its users fled and Digg dug its own grave. There aren't so many competitors for Slashdot that its users want it too to be ruined, so they're trying to ensure that it doesn't go that route.

I don't often counsel this in the IT world, but if it ain't broke...

If it ain't broke, it must run at least as well as Friendster.... Right? Or maybe it runs as well as Altavista? Geocities? Need some more examples of services that failed to change at the right time? No one said "f--- this beta friendster s---, I'm going to facebook because I dont like this any more", did they? Nope, they said "well hell, 10 of my friends just joined facebook, what am I doing on friendster?" and the rest is history.

There's one critical difference, though. One group lost membership by failing to adapt when competitors started sucking their members away. The other group, however, chased members away. Slashdot seems to be falling into that second category.

I believe that the presence of the words "information extraction" and "information retrieval" in the summary means that the search engine should be able to answer questions of the type "which kings were assassinated less then two years after their coronation?" by going through the facts available on the web, extracting them, and figuring stuff out. For any given random question, it's unlikely that someone already has it answered on the web, but the facts are all there anyway.

Sort of. But Watson is probably too small (or primitive) a system to be efficient at a large scale (as in, serving a Google-sized audience). I have no idea how DARPA wants to tackle that. But hey, that's why they call it research!;-)

Agree with that. The other concern i have is that i want results only after 2011, for example chasing up statistics/surveys and looking for relevant ones, I constant find results from, say 2005. But because the site it is on refreshes the container for the content, it looks like new content. Note an easy thing to solve but perhaps google can hash the content, excluding the framework, and work out the true age of the content.

This issue was not a problem when everything googled was new, but after ten years

I have found most people regurgitating this phrase haven't actually *used* the competition. Try using Bing for every search for a month, and you may find what I've found: Bing is better for obscure information, which is likely due to the fact that it's actually superior technology but doesn't have the advantage of a billion people combing through the results to find the best ones. It also seems to be better at juggling results. Searching on a technical issue that may be similar to another issue in the same

How is Google supposed to know what to do with that? Do you want norse mythology, a comic book, or something else? Do you want packet switching information, bank information, or "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing" -- that's a new one.

About a decade ago, "Cow9" -- that was the name of the alta vista search engine -- had a wonderful solution to this, that required loading a java applet into your browser as part of the search. I loved it, and was

Google really is an exceptionally good search engine if it wasn't for a career known as "Internet Marketing". Scam and ad sites are the #1 reason why it's so damn hard to find relevant pages in a search. I should not have to construct a search query that spans the entire width of a 1680 monitor just to filter out all the criminally insane "Internet Marketing" guys grab for cash.

Actually there is more truth in this answer than most people would think. With wolfram alpha and knowledge graphs Google did recently included features that actually do waht DARPA has in mind: make sense of crawled data, draw conclusions and display accordingly.

The difference with Google is: They do introduce the changes step by step. But it is defininately out there: I just recently noticed that the first search results are more and more spread around different possible meanings of my search terms, when in

First, remember that this is essentially where the world wide web of internetworked computers began. The words 'unintended consequences' come screaming to mind . . . (although I have to admit - I love those wicked pipes!)

Second - we (common netizens) may welcome the sort of information availability DARPA is seeking - sort of like the scifi future where you just ask the nearest terminal whatever you want to know and magically get the answer you need - but there are lots of bad people still running around on this planet (scamsters, governments, jilted ex-lovers, religious extremists, etc.). The problem isn't the technology, the problem is our ability to handle it.

I very much suspect DARPA may be onto something. I wonder if it will be as beneficial as the WWW has been.

Google has something like this as well but it can be hard to notice. I remember one time I was searching for something automotive-related and my query had a word in it that meant something in the fashion world. It took hell to get out of "fashion mode" and get automotive results, IIRC I had to completely rephrase the question.

Sometimes, as you read the RFP document you can tell it's been written with a specific proposer in mind, and everybody else gets a short window to come up with an idea + jump through endless list of government hoops.

Today unstructured information search findability is limited by the Shannon Limit, this is a fundamental physical limit since all pattern search engines are statistical decoders. Google does a little better than the Shannon limit by looking at which search results are selected, this a communal intelligence technique based on how we "vote" for the right result. Unfortunately this only works well for high volume searches, that's why Google work's best if you know exactly what you're looking for or you're look

This sounds like progmatically generated RDF(http://www.w3.org/RDF/), and could be handled via OWL(http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/)...
Current search engines and metadata focus on content (which makes sense), but leave out context. W3C have been supporting research on Ontological networks, where semantics are collected and linked. The W3C concept is self-assigning meaning to the content. DARPA's Memex sounds like they are assigning meaning via a 3rd party.
Less privacy, more meaning.

Google has produce less useful hits over the last five years, as its advertising income skyrocketed. Search for something, and add -"photo", and you'll still get photographer. Try mens riding boots -women -womens -women's, and you'll probably get a "sponsored ad" for women's boots, with the letters "men" bolded.

This isn't even counting Target, which will claim it has anything you're looking for, but if you follow the link, oh, no, sorry... but we have !!!!!

My screen just came up in beta, slow to load & impossible to read comments. Tried clicking on "classic" at the bottom, it's been trashed also.
I logged in today for the first time in ten years just to say Beta Sucks and I will be finding another site to read every morning with my coffee.
I will be canceling my subscription...so sad but this "new" look with its intention run by greed and ego is NOT why I signed up for slashdot many years ago.